If you look at Mobil 5000 and the voa of Honda they are not the same. Not at all. So that leaves you with knowing the Honda oil is made by Mobil but not something you can go out and duplicate off the shelf. Same too the idea the new COP oil is going to be Motorcraft in a new bottle might not be the case either. Honda will make the oil that makes them the most money and the cars running till 60,000 or 5 years which ever comes first. Nothing means more than profit the oil will be made with that being the most important item.
Originally Posted By: Gurney
A couple of small points, tpatt: When your owner's manual was written, "Honda Motor Oil" (meaning the bottled product sold by your Honda dealer) was, in fact, Mobil Clean 5000. It was, and still is, a conventional oil. (And a pretty good one, too. See
http://www.pqiamerica.com/testresults3a.html.)
Recently, as you may know, Honda turned to ConocoPhillips (COP) for its bottled and bulk oil products. COP also happens to be Ford Motor Company's supplier for Motorcraft 5W-20 weight motor oil. In that weight, MC is a semi-synthetic oil. I (and a few others who trade COP) believe it's unlikely that COP will create another (different) bulk or bottled 5W-20 weight product just for HMC, which means that Honda customers who purchase "Honda Motor Oil" in the future will, in fact, be buying COP's semi-synthetic Motorcraft oil sold under a Honda label. This will work out well for the customer: whereas before you would have been buying XOM's conventional 5W-20 weight oil, now you'll be buying COP's 5W-20 semi-synthetic. It might be a bargain.
Of course, you can purchase the exact same product already, and likely save a few dollars more while you're at it, simply by buying Motorcraft 5W-20 oil at WalMart.
In any case, I agree with
Bill in Utah that it really doesn't matter what you run in a Honda Civic (said the guy who's owned all sorts of Hondas). With 5K oil changes, your's will last forever. I also agree with you that the fun part of any oil change is doing it yourself.